Last week the US lost its 1,000th soldier killed in combat. Why did no one notice?

Andrew Buncombe, Severin Carrell and Raymond Whitaker
The Independent
12 December 2004

A deadly milestone was reached in Iraq last week, and hardly anyone noticed. Captain Mark Stubenhofer of the US army's 41st Infantry Regiment, killed in a firefight on a street in Baghdad on Tuesday, was the 1,000th American to die in combat since the country was invaded nearly 21 months ago - yet none of the reports of his death mentioned the fact.

The reason? Only one news agency spotted that the Pentagon's official tally of deaths in action had reached 999, and that its latest casualty announcement meant that the toll was now in four figures. And when Capt Stubenhofer's name was released later, after his family had been informed, no news organisation made the connection, not even The Washington Post, which carried a story because his home town - Springfield, Virginia - is in its circulation area.

The Post reported that Capt Stubenhofer, 30, had last spoken to his parents when he called from Iraq to tell them his wife had had their third child, a daughter. "He never got to see her, though. She'll only know him through us," his mother, Sallie Stubenhofer, told the newspaper. It was his second tour of duty in Iraq; during his first he was awarded the Bronze Star.

Thanks to a website that meticulously records coalition casualties, icasualties.org, we can see that Capt Stubenhofer was older and more senior than most US soldiers killed in Iraq, and that Baghdad, where he died, has claimed more American lives than anywhere else in the country. But because the most significant statistic was missed, there was no analysis of the cost of the conflict so far.

Two years ago, when the rush to war was becoming unstoppable, would we have thought twice if we had known how many Iraqis and non-Iraqis would die or be damaged? This question was not asked on the occasion of Mark Stubenhofer's death: and that is exactly how the Pentagon and the Ministry of Defence want it.

In the debate over casualties, the only clear-cut figures are those on coalition deaths, because the British and US governments know it would be impossible to suppress them. But as icasualties.org makes clear, the Pentagon "certainly doesn't go out of its way to divulge" the number of losses. "We are told that during the Korean and Vietnam wars, the names and numbers of dead AND injured were available from the government," it adds. "No longer."

In 2003 the White House issued a directive banning reporters from attending the return of coffins containing the bodies of US troops to Dover Air Force base in Delaware. A Freedom of Information Act loophole, which forced the release of some photographs of such returns, was closed, and a civilian worker who took pictures of coffins aboard an aircraft in Kuwait was sacked.

The British, says the website, "do a much better job with their dead", listing in one place all those lost in the war - though this is clearly easier when the toll is much lower than in the US. There are photographs of the ceremonial return of coffins; the MoD posts the names, pictures and brief biographies, with tributes, of every dead serviceman and woman on its website within a day or two of their death.

What neither Britain nor the US wants, however, is for anyone to dwell on the much greater numbers of military personnel who have returned with physical or mental injuries. Thanks to medical advances, particularly in battlefield treatment, for every US soldier killed in Iraq nine more have been wounded and survived, the highest ratio ever. But media access to military hospitals such as Walter Reed in Washington or Landstuhl in Germany is tightly controlled. Officials at Landstuhl said last month that doctors had treated 17,878 injured or sick US troops from Iraq.

Getting figures from the MoD about the exact number of British injured in the Iraq conflict is very difficult, and no breakdown on the cause of those injuries is obtainable. Official figures are patchy. The MoD claims releasing casualty data - even rounded-up figures on the type or cause of injuries - breaches patient confidentiality. It says the Defence Medical Services Department insists on this. A spokesman added: "As there is, therefore, no need to collate this information centrally, this is not done."

James Bond, an expert on military compensation claims at the Royal British Legion, the UK's largest ex-services welfare agency, retorted: "Of all the excuses one could think of, that's probably the worst. I don't see how the general release of statistics will affect anybody's recovery. What it will affect, of course, which may be more to the point, is morale - both within the services and in particular the service families. They would reveal that the risks of people getting injured are actually quite high. It's a morale issue rather than a medical issue."

Commodore Toby Elliott, the chief executive of Combat Stress, the main charity for mentally ill ex-servicemen, was more blunt, calling the MoD's stance "a load of bullshit". The MoD as well as those involved in the care of service casualties need the figures, he said.

At least the coalition members collect figures for their own casualties. What outraged a group of more than 40 diplomats, peers, scientists and churchmen who petitioned Tony Blair last week is that they make no effort to count the far higher totals of Iraqi civilians killed and injured. The Prime Minister brushed off their demand for an independent inquiry into the toll, saying figures from the Iraqi Ministry of Health "are in our view the most accurate survey there is".

But the ministry, which says 3,853 civilians were killed between April and October this year, has no figures for the preceding period, and many of those killed in Iraq never go to a hospital. Since it is well known that civilians were an increasing proportion of fatalities in conflicts during the 20th century - rising from 15 per cent in the First World War to 90 per cent in the "low-intensity" wars in Africa, East Timor and the former Yugoslavia, according to Barbara Ehrenreich in her 1997 book, Blood Rites - it is hard to escape the conclusion that Washington and London simply do not want to know the figures, to avoid the political fallout they could create.

The thinking became clear from the response of a spokeswoman for the Pentagon, Lt-Col Ellen Krenke, when The Independent on Sunday asked about numbers of Iraqi dead. "It is something that is not done," she said. "We just never have. We keep count of our own, but not the enemy." We were asking about civilians, we pointed out. "No," she said, "we don't do that either."

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Citation: Andrew Buncombe, Severin Carrell and Raymond Whitaker, "Last week the US lost its 1,000th soldier killed in combat. Why did no one notice?," The Independent, 12 December 2004.